“I don’t want to express alienation. It isn’t what I feel. I’m interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Passion
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and given them an idea of something better. A better state of one’s feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one’s self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“The ratio of authentic literature to trash in pornography may be somewhat lower than the ratio of novels of genuine literary merit to the entire volume of sub-literary fiction produced for mass taste. But it is probably not lower than, for instance, that of another somewhat shady sub-genre with a few first-rate books to its credit, science fiction.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it–by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Experience
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Family
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Truth
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Truth
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“Unfortunately, moral beauty in art–like physical beauty in a person–is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Morality
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Beauty
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Writing
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Truth
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“Taste has no system and no proofs.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Adversity
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Problems
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Possibilities
Vote Up
0
Vote Down
Favorite
“What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn’t sex but death.”
Susan Sontag
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General
